Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Ad-Ver-Sary Organizes Free Music Torrent in Memory of Aaron Swartz


We love Ad-Ver-Sary on this blog for bravely bringing the stuff we talk about here onto the stage. Recently he has started a project in honor of Aaron Swartz, coder and activist who was pushed to suicide by the consistent stress and pressure placed on him by the state and JSTOR for giving out scientific articles for free.


100 Albums

Everyone has already heard about the way Aaron Swartz was treated during the JSTOR investigation, so I'm not going to talk about that. Everyone has heard a hundred different opinions on suicide and mental wellbeing, so I'm not going to talk about that. Aaron Swartz also lived. He helped launch the Creative Commons, and acted as advocate and activist to help make it what it is today: An organization that has enabled artists to make their works available to audiences.
Everything Aaron worked on was in some way about making information available. And I'd like to help him do that.

What I'm Doing

I'm asking musicians who have already-released albums to license those albums under the Creative Commons so that it's legal for fans to share those albums. I want to take some of the art that is out there and make it available to everyone.
I'm hoping to get 100 albums licensed. 100 albums that used to be illegal to copy, now available for fans to share forever. 100 pieces of art you don't need to pay to access.
The albums all have to be:

  1. Commercially available at some point (out of print is fine)
  2. Not already released under any prior CC/GPL/etc license
That's it. I'm not including albums that are already available under a Creative Commons license (like my own) because this is specifically about taking existing art and giving the public new rights to it.


Read more at the website.

No comments:

Post a Comment